Description

Nick and Roger suggested that we figure out how to communicate to policy people in their own language why we are reluctant to believe DNT will actually accomplish anything productive, and therefore why we are reluctant to endorse it.

I hold a slightly more extreme position: That DNT is actually likely to introduce a regulatory sinkhole that we want no part of. In almost every case, we should be developing end to end cryptographic strategies to dealing with the issue of infrastructure trust and tracking.

We should spend the time to communicate these ideas to the DNT folks. To quote Roger, "the more the policy people think they're solving the problem, the less likely anybody is to solve the problem."

However, until we develop end-to-end cryptographic solutions to address the issue of infrastructure trust, there might still be use for a "Do Not Sell" header. To quote myself from #5501:

It's possible that if the header was actually called "Do Not Sell", it might make a little more sense to trust it to drive policy successfully, because that is a much more direct statement to a top-level site that you want the information that you provide to them to stay between you and them. But "Do Not Track" is waaay too vague a term for any hope that it will transform into something meaningful, consistent, and benevolent in all circumstances.

But if we just devote just one "David Chaum" worth of IQ to that problem, we can solve it too, without "Do Not Sell".

No need for us to destroy DNT anymore, although I am sympathetic to the idea (apart from that this thing got actually spec'ed and implemented). There are other browser folks moving forward to an actual protection by technology, so we are on the right track.